Change text size

Larger Smaller

Click to close

enlarge

Jerry Seinfeld played to a sold-out crowd Friday at the Overture Center. - File photo

print  ::  comment

loading ratings...

Did you ever notice how some comedians will tell the same jokes every time they come to town? What is the deal with that?

If the above sounds a little familiar to Jerry Seinfeld fans, well, so did at least half of Seinfeld's 70-minute set before a sold-out crowd at Overture Hall on Friday night. The television megastar wasn't on stage more than five minutes before he launched into a routine he had done the last time he was at Overture, a riff on the cable news networks news ticker ("Don't the news channels know that we don't want to read? That's why we're watching TV") that felt plenty musty.

That's no big crime; just as touring musicians mix older hits and new tunes when they play, comedians should have the right to fall back on their surefire material, especially when a show is just getting under way. But given that the crowd was most likely a pretty rabid Seinfeld crew -- the top ticket was $81 and they all sold out within hours -- you'd think the comedian wouldn't try to field so many older jokes.

But Seinfeld remains one of the best stand-up comedians in the history of the art form, as influential to his generation of comics as Bill Cosby and George Carlin were to theirs. And he's so good of a performer that familiarity rarely makes his jokes less funny. At one point, he riffed about a moviegoer's right to be a slob in the theater -- I knew what the punch line was, I saw it coming, but when it arrived, I laughed all the same.

With a few early remarks about Madison ("I saw people today bicycling and sailing. Do you have any idea what month it is?") and the architecture of Overture Hall ("We did ask for some higher seats" he told the folks in the upper deck), Seinfeld got down to business.

After breezing through some return bits like the news ticker, kamikaze pilots and terrorists who train on the monkey bars, Seinfeld did have plenty of new material. He talked about everything from TV ads for prescription drugs ("Why are the people with acid reflux hanging out on the edge of a volcano?") or the reasons why wedding receptions never make good parties ("If you were going to plan a good party, would you first invite all the oldest people you know, so you can watch them eat?")

Since "Seinfeld" went off the air 11 years ago, Seinfeld has gotten married and has three kids, and some of his material about the powerlessness of being the family patriarch echoed that of one of his idols, Cosby. He said he doesn't hang out with single guy friends anymore. "If you don't have a wife, what are we going to talk about? You have a girlfriend? That's Wiffle Ball, my friend."

Seinfeld is anything but topical or profound, but some of his best material does have some social sting to it, as when he made some astute comments about personal technology that supposed to make our lives better. He did a brilliant extended routine on how people's moods are often tied to their cell phone charge ("Those bars are like bullets, locked and loaded"), and the futility of trying to hold a conversation with a BlackBerry user. "You try to talk to them, but their pupils are dead. It's like a painted doll's eyes."

Interestingly, when Seinfeld was working hard to put out one of television's greatest shows, he was a fairly low-energy stand-up comic. But since the show, he's become much more energetic a performer. Throughout the show he was bounding back and forth across the stage in his sharp suit, arms windmilling and pantomiming, selling the jokes for the cheap seats as well as the front rows. My one quibble with the new high-octane Jerry is his tendency to use an irritatingly high-pitched, screechy voice (think of Flip Wilson's Geraldine) for his punch lines. It made you long for the well-executed seething monotone of a "Hello, Newman."

When David Letterman had his show on NBC in the 1980s, Seinfeld often seemed to be the stand-up comic guest. And when Seinfeld wasn't on, often it seemed like the terrific Larry Miller would be the one doing four minutes of material at the end of the show.

In a welcome surprise for fans of the old "Late Night," Miller was the warm-up comedian for Seinfeld's set. He's a really sharp and smart comedian, and his 20 minutes were full of great observations, like how each generation is softer and lazier than the one before. "My dad worked three jobs and went to school at night. If I go to the cleaners and the bank in one day, I need a nap."

Jerry Seinfeld played to a sold-out crowd Friday at the Overture Center.